In wireless communication systems, antenna arrays are used at devices on one or both ends of a communication link to suppress multipath fading and interference and to increase system capacity by supporting multiple co-channel users and/or higher data rate transmissions. In a frequency division duplex (FDD) system, configuring a base station equipped with an antenna array to achieve improved downlink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission performance is more difficult than improving the performance on an associated uplink due to a lack of information of estimated downlink channel coefficients. In general, a downlink channel covariance can be used to determine the downlink beamforming weights. However, in many situations an uplink channel covariance cannot be used to compute predicted or candidate downlink beamforming weights. In a FDD wireless communication system, the base station may not have the instantaneous downlink channel covariance matrix unless there is feedback information provided by a mobile station to the base station. Feedback of downlink channel information increases the overhead placed on the communication channel and therefore reduces the uplink channel capacity. Thus, it is preferable to avoid the reliance on feedback information when possible.